Cloud computing refers to the practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on a public network (e.g., the Internet) to deliver information computing services (i.e., cloud services) as opposed to doing so on a local server. The network architecture (e.g., virtualized information processing environment comprising hardware and software) through which these cloud services are provided to service consumers (i.e., a cloud service consumers) is referred to as “the cloud”, which can be a public cloud (e.g., cloud services provided publicly to cloud service consumers) or a private cloud (e.g., a private network or data center that supplies cloud services to only a specified group of cloud service consumers within an enterprise), or a community cloud (e.g., a set of cloud services provided publicly to a limited set of cloud service consumers, e.g., to agencies with a specific State/Region or set of States/Regions), dedicated/hosted private cloud, or other emerging cloud service delivery models. The underlying intent of cloud computing is to provide easy, scalable access to computing resources and information technology (IT) services to cloud service consumers.
Cloud computing provides access to a wide range of services. These services range from processing, server, storage, network, applications and online services. These services allow cloud consumers to rapidly provision, manage and release resources on demand with little management effort and without service provider interaction. Providers may advertise a set of services as a package bundle-often referred to as “plans” or “offers.” Cloud consumers can subscribe to these package bundles to get a system-wide entity called a subscription that provides consumer access to all advertised services. Once a subscription is acquired, then the consumers can create resources using these different services.
A cloud computing infrastructure may include a set of services registered by a service provider during initial setup. The set of services gets up-dated (e.g., added and removed) over time. These cloud infrastructure services are of different types ranging from services required to monitor, run and manage cloud infrastructure (often called “system services”) to services directly used by the cloud consumers to create their own resources (often called “resource providers”). There may be a central service that manages all of these registered services.
There may be scenarios in which one or more cloud service experiences operational difficulty because of software, hardware or network failures. If one or more system service fails, then cloud system functionality is impacted, and the cloud system may be unusable to accomplish tasks supported by the malfunctioning one or more system service. If the central service fails, the entire cloud system may fail to respond to cloud consumer requests and/or may become unavailable.
It is with respect to these considerations and others that the disclosure made herein is presented.